A Course Correction? What Rangaraj and Kamal Haasan Get Right about Personality Rights
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In a marked departure from prior personality-rights jurisprudence, the Madras High Court in T. Rangaraj v. Joy Cridzila and Kamal Hassan v. Neeyevidai seems to recalibrate the threshold for injunctive relief by tethering personality rights to demonstrable commercial misappropriation rather than mere unauthorised reference by the defendants. Arjun Ishaan analyses these orders and highlights how, by separating subjective reputational grievance from enforceable legal injury, the Court restores doctrinal discipline to an area increasingly prone to over-expansive claims. Arjun is a 3rd year student at B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) at Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur. He is passionate about legal research and staying abreast of new developments in law, especially in the field of Intellectual Property, Company Law and Arbitration Law.
Poster for the movie Vikram, featuring Kamal Haasan. Image from hereA Course Correction? What Rangaraj and Kamal Haasan Get Right about Personality Rights
By Arjun Ishaan
Over the last few years, Indian Courts have shown an inclination to protect celebrities’ identity, granting interim injunctions restraining the use of their names, voices, images, and even stylistic attributes. These were often granted on the simple premise that a celebrity’s persona was used without consent. The two recent orders of the Madras High Court passed by Justice N. Senthilkumar and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy in T. Rangaraj v. Joy Cridzila and Kamal Hassan v. Neeyevidai, respectively, depict a significant departure from the established trend. In these orders, the Madras High Court clearly demarcates subjective reputational harm and enforceable legal injury, insisting that personality rights are triggered when there is ascertainable commercial intent to exploit an individual’s persona.
In the orders, the Court firmly rejected attempts to use personality rights as a tool to silence free speech, criticism, or artistic expression, thereby curbing the chilling effect that expansive injunctions may create. It represents a restrained, principled, and thoughtfully reasoned decision, reaffirming doctrinal clarity to personality rights jurisprudence.
This post argues that decisions by the Madras HC are a much-needed course correction in India’s personality rights doctrine, moving it towards a commercial misappropriation model from a popularity-centric one, and offers clarity on the distinction between personality rights and rights of publicity while also critiquing the orders’ shortcomings in addressing non-commercial privacy and deep fake harms.
Beyond Mere Recognition: Identifiability Alone Does Not Trigger Personality Rights:
The Madras HC’s orders in Rangaraj and Kamal Haasan cases consciously avoided the shortcut of equating recognisability with breach of personality rights as seen in Rajat Sharma and Anr. V. Tamara Doc and Ors. The cases involved filmmaker T. Rangaraj and actor Kamal Haasan, both publicly recognizable persons asserting their personality rights claims. In Rangaraj, the Court held that mere circulation of information about a person’s private life does not amount to a violation of personality rights unless commercial gain is proved. The circulation of personal information by news channels and other digital platforms in relation to some social controversy does not amount to an infringement of personality rights. The Court refused to grant personality rights simply because the individual was recognisable.
In Kamal Haasan, an injunction was granted not because of its celebrity status but because of demonstrable economic exploitation. However, the Court carves out protection for caricature, satire, and creative expression, underscoring that mere public recognisability remains unaffected unless there was commercial misuse.
Personality Rights v. Right of Publicity: How Rangaraj and Kamal Haasan Offer Clarity:
As pointed out by Anureet Kaur, Indian courts over the years have persistently failed to differentiate between ‘personality rights’ and ‘rights of publicity’. The former is rooted in privacy and dignity established in R. Rajagopal v. State of TN, while the latter has economic value at its core, developed in the US case of Haelan Labs v. Topps Chewing Gum. The Madras HC has attempted to address this confusion by rejecting the idea that mere circulation of personal information doesn’t automatically trigger personality rights unless commercial exploitation is explicitly proved.
In Rangaraj, the Court held that personality rights are not about controlling visibility or public discussion. The Court makes it clear that mere circulation of information about a social controversy is not enough unless it is tied to commercial exploitation. In Kamal Haasan, the Court held that the right of publicity is strictly commercial, restoring publicity rights to their economic logic. Therefore, it restores the economic logic of publicity rights while preventing dignity-based personality claims from being used as a tool to suppress free speech.
Contextual Adjudication over Blanket Injunctions:
The Madras HC in Rangaraj adopts a restrained approach that protects free speech towards personality rights. The Court’s insistence that personality rights require commercial exploitation, not mere public circulation echoes the critique of the existing judicial approach to personality rights by Adyasha, Akshat, and Tanishka. It acts as a correction to an increasingly broad doctrine formed in orders passed by DHC in several cases such as Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev v. Rogue Websites & Ors. and Ankur Warikoo v. John Doe & Ors. (As discussed here by Anureet Kaur).
The Court’s emphasis on Article 19(1) (a) as an important factor in deciding the case restores personality rights to its original commercial misappropriation rationale. The decision firmly rejected the growing tendency of Indian Courts to grant infringement because of celebrity status (As discussed here by Pranjali Sahani and Souradeep Mukhopadhyay). Furthermore, insistence on commercial gain as a threshold requirement for granting personality rights negates the expansive right to control identity by combining privacy, dignity, and publicity into a single right. The Court reiterated the point of commercial misappropriation or consumer deception as seen by the Delhi High Court in Gautam Gambhir v. D.A.P. & Co. in 2017.
In the Kamal Haasan case, relief was granted not because the act was a celebrity or a recognizable person but because there was demonstrable commercial exploitation through unauthorized use of morphed images and merchandise. Similar to Rangaraj, the Court emphasized the presence of commercial intent for granting personality rights and acknowledged the chilling impact that expansive injunctions can have on free speech by expressly carving out exceptions for caricature, satire and artistic expressions (see para 3 of the order). It represents a departure from the trend of Courts granting expansive injunctions to celebrities often suppressing free speech as seen in DHC’s order in Vishnu Manchu case (As discussed here by Praharsh Gour and Yukta Chordia) Therefore, the Court prevented the use of personality rights as a tool for private censorship based on artistic disagreements.
A similar example of this cautious approach could be the Jackie Shroff case (discussed here and here). In this case, the DHC granted a partial injunction and made active efforts to protect freedom of speech in memes, parody, and caricature under Article 19 (1) (a).
The striking feature in both these orders is the Court’s conscious exercise of judicial restraint, especially at the interim stage, despite reputational discomfort, thereby avoiding interim injunctions getting converted to speech-supressing reliefs. This approach can also be noted in recent DHC’s order in the Bhuvan Bam case and BHC’s order in Shilpa Shetty case where the Courts have refused to grant personality rights at the interim stage merely because the person is recognisable.
Reading together, both the order depict a pushback against popularity driven injunction model (as seen in the cases of Raj Sharmani and Sudhir Chaudhary), where the Court granted an injunction on the sole basis of the plaintiff’s popularity. The Madras HC reaffirmed the granting of personality rights only on the basis of commercial misappropriation, keeping judicial restraint and free speech at the forefront. Hence, reaffirming the main point that identity protection does not come at the cost of free speech and artistic freedom.
What the Decisions Leave Unanswered:
While the Madras HC in both order brings much-needed clarity and restraint to personality rights jurisprudence, it leaves several important questions unanswered. Firstly, it fails to develop a clear test for identifying commercial misappropriation, especially overlooking newer forms of economic misuse such as indirect monetisation and misleading algorithms. Secondly, overemphasis on commercial gain may underplay non-commercial yet privacy breaches. Viral circulation of intimate or personal content can cause serious harm, even though done without commercial intent. The judicial decisions so far have failed to develop guidelines as to how it should be addressed without reverting to broad interpretations of personality rights. Although these concerns are within the domain of privacy and data protection, and legislative efforts are underway under the IT Act, such as proposed rules on deep fakes. However, the regulations till now remain fragmented and evolving, hence, the need for courts to intervene and establish doctrinal clarity until a coherent privacy framework is developed.
Conclusion:
These new sets of orders represent a course correction in India’s personality rights doctrine. They move personality rights from a popularity centric and injunction heavy approach, as seen in a plethora of cases, back towards a commercial misappropriation centric model which focuses on commercial intent, scrutiny of free speech and a clear space for artistic freedom. They also demarcate a clear difference between personality rights and rights of publicity.
However, restraint alone is not sufficient; without clear tests for commercial exploitation engagement with newer technologies, uncertainty remains. If built upon these decisions, this approach can prevent personality rights from becoming a tool of suppressing free speech and safeguard genuine commercial misuse.